Elon Musk wasn’t wrong about automating the Model 3 assembly line — he was just ahead of his time

Ryan Kottenstette

Contributor

Ryan Kottenstette is CEO and co-founder at Cape Analytics.

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In 2017, when Tesla announced incredibly grandiose Model 3 production targets of 5,000 Model 3s per week and the opening up of” make blaze ,” analysts were wary. But Elon Musk claimed he could pull it off, citing hyper-automation — a robotic assembly line — as his secret weapon to increase constructing acceleration and drive down penalties. Fast-forward a year and a half and Tesla delivered 91, 000 vehicles in Q4 2018. But the ramp-up didn’t come without big matters and a move away from Musk’s original imagination of a highly automated assembly line.

What happened?

Asked why the push toward automation didn’t pan off, Elon’s answer revolved around one important issues: robotic dream, or the software that controls what the assembly line robots can ” verify” and then do based on such a computer see. Unfortunately, the assembly line robots time couldn’t enter into negotiations with surprising orientations of objects like nuts and bolts, or involved ploy between the car formulate. Every such issue would cause the assembly line to stop. In the end, it was far easier to substitute humans for robots in countless assembly situations.

Today, computer vision( the umbrella period for robotic eyesight) is everywhere and represents the next frontier of AI technologies and groundbreaking works across a variety of manufactures. The breakthroughs being started right now by researchers and companies in the gap are superb and represent the missing sections needed to move Elon Musk’s vision of an automated gondola assembly line a reality. At its core, these advances will give computers and robots the ability to reliably address the prodigious array of unexpected corner suits — those wayward nuts and bolts — that occur in the real world.

A watershed moment in computer see

Computer vision knew a watershed instant in 2012 in its implementation of convolutional neural network. Since then, it has really picked up steam. Before 2012, computer imagination was chiefly about hand-crafted mixtures — mostly, algorithms had manually characterized power begins and could mathematically describe the specific characteristics of an image relatively effectively. These were hand-selected and then blended by a computer image investigate when establishing a specific object in an idol, like a bicycle, a storefront or a face.

The rise of machine learning and advances in artificial neural net changed all of that, allowing us to develop algorithms using massive amounts of training data that can automatically decipher and learn persona boasts. The net the consequences of this was twofold:( 1) mixtures became much more robust( e.g. a face could still be identified as a face, even though they are it were oriented slightly differently, or in shadow ), and( 2) the creation of good solutions grew reliant upon large amounts of high-quality teaching data( poses learn peculiarities based on the training data, so it is critical that the training data is accurate, ample in sum and represents the full diversity of situations the algorithm may later check ).

Now in the laboratory: GANs, unsupervised learning and synthetic data

Next, brand-new approachings like GANs( Generative Adversarial Networks ), unsupervised learning and synthetic field truth furnish the health risks to substantially reduce both the amount of training data required to develop high-quality computer seeing simulations, as well as the time and effort required to collect the data. With these approaches, structures can actually bootstrap their own learning and mark region the circumstances and outliers with higher accuracy, far faster. Human can then evaluate the region events to refine answers and get at a high-quality simulation much more quickly.

These brand-new approachings are rapidly expanding the envelope of computer eyesight in terms of applications, robustness and reliability. Not exclusively do they prop the promise to solve Mr. Musk’s manufacturing challenges, but they are able to too dramatically extend the boundaries in myriad critical employments, some of which are highlighted below 😛 TAGEND

Manufacturing Automation: Robots will increasingly have the capability to deal with objectives at randomized orientations, like a gondola accommodate that is 20 positions off-center or a screw that is an inch extremely far to the left. Even significantly, robots will be able to reliably identify soft, flexible, transparent objects( think about, for example, the plastic crate of socks you succession on Amazon last week ). New robotics providers like Berkshire Grey are at the cutting edge of this.

Facial Detection: Previously, facial spotting was not robust in region instances like place tilts, incomplete shade or occlusion, or babies’ faces. Now, researchers are find that computer imagination can work to identify uncommon congenital disease from a photo of a face, with 90 percentage accuracy. Particular lotions are implemented in the sides of consumers, which is only possible because algorithms has also become more robust to diverse lighting modes and other situations that arise of the consequences of less insure over persona capture.

Medical Imaging: Boosts are now allowing for the automation of MRI evaluation, bark cancer spotting, and a number of other important give suits.

Driver Assistance and Automation: Self-driving plans were flunking when it was foggy, since they are unable to differentiate between ponderous fog and a rock-and-roll. Now, unsupervised learning and the possibility of creating synthetic data( led by the likes of Nvidia) are starting to be used to train the system on reces occasions that even billions of recorded driving miles cannot uncover.

Agriculture: Fellowships like Blue River Technology( be achieved by John Deere) are now reliably able to differentiate between grass and crops, and selectively spray herbicide automatically, facilitating a spectacular reduction in the quantity of noxiou compounds in use by commercial-grade agriculture.

Real Estate and Property Information: Using computer vision on top of geospatial imagery could be used manufacturers to automatically mark when inundations, wildfires or hurricane-force gales may pose a danger to specific assets — giving homeowners to taken any steps faster, before tragedy strikes.

When looking at these advances, one thing speedily is quite clear: Elon Musk wasn’t wrong. It’s just that his image( robotic and otherwise) was a year or two away from reality. AI, computer imagination and robotics are all nearing a tip-off point of accuracy, reliability and efficacy. For Tesla, it means that the next ramp up to” yield inferno”( likely for the mannequin Y) will see a vastly different assembly line at its Fremont and Shanghai factories — one that they are able to more successfully implement robotics paired with computer vision.